Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [127]
7. In 1964, Mrs. Kennedy still thought of liberals as people who gave Jack trouble—as did, on occasion, her husband. Members of the group that JFK called "professional liberals" had mistrusted him since he first ran for the House in 1946 because of his conservative father. Once he was President, they charged that he was a militant Cold Warrior and too intimidated by conservative southern Democratic congressional committee chairmen to vigorously pursue the liberal agenda on civil rights, education, labor, health, poverty, and other domestic issues.
8. FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, JR. (1914–1988) served in Congress with JFK from 1949 to 1955. Kennedy especially valued his endorsement in 1960 because it offset the pre-convention opposition of his mother, Eleanor, who much preferred her close friend Stevenson. After failing to find him a suitable position in his government (he asked McNamara to appoint him secretary or assistant secretary of the navy, as his father had been under Wilson, but the new Pentagon chief refused), the President made him undersecretary of commerce in 1963.
9. Campaigning for JFK in West Virginia, Roosevelt told reporters that Humphrey was "a good Democrat, but I don't know where he was in World War II." In fact, the Minnesotan had tried to enter the wartime military but was rejected because of a hernia.
10. This melodrama was Private Property, by director Leslie Stevens, so low budget that it was filmed in Stevens's Hollywood Hills home, starring his wife, Kate Manx. It portrays a housewife taking up with hoodlums, with scenes of rape and murder. By Bradlee's recollection, JFK speculated (correctly) that Private Property was on the Catholic Church's index of prohibited films, and joked that it would have helped him with some of West Virginia's Catholic-hating voters, had they known he would be watching it.
11. TOM MBOYA (1930–1969) was a young Kenyan nationalist leader who, during their July 26, 1960, meeting in Hyannis Port, convinced JFK, chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Africa, to have the Kennedy family foundation support the effort by Mboya's Airlift Africa to place Kenyan students in American universities. One young Kenyan studying in America was Barack Obama, Sr., an Mboya friend and supporter who had arrived in 1959.
12. STANISLAS ALBERT RADZIWILL (1914–1976), known as Stas, was an exiled Polish prince and London real estate investor who was the second husband of Jacqueline's sister Lee. He campaigned among Polish voters for JFK in 1960 and was John's godfather.
13. Although it was not publicly advertised at the time, Mrs. Kennedy was suffering through a difficult pregnancy. She had been asked by doctors to stay as quiet as possible until the expected birth in December. "Janet" refers to her half-sister, Janet Auchincloss.
14. Referring to the Illinoisan's encouragement of a Stevenson draft movement in Los Angeles.
15. Before the convention in Los Angeles, operatives for Lyndon Johnson had cast grim forebodings about Senator Kennedy's health.
16. In Los Angeles, LBJ had castigated Joseph Kennedy (with whom he had previously been quite amicable and who had quietly urged him to run for president in 1956 with Jack as running mate) for his pessimism before World War II about Britain's chances against Nazi Germany. Johnson said, "I never thought Hitler was right."
17. Off the tape, Jacqueline told Schlesinger that during the visit, she had asked Lady Bird what she had been doing since the convention, expecting her to say something like she had been "resting up since that madhouse." Instead Mrs. Johnson replied that she had been sending notes to all those people who had been so kind to her husband in Los Angeles.
18. On the day of his nomination, Kennedy had told Symington's close Missouri friend Clark Clifford that he intended to make Symington—who had run his own desultory presidential campaign, hoping to be chosen after a convention deadlock—his running mate. Symington thereupon started writing his acceptance speech. But the next day, JFK told Clifford that, having been persuaded during